Fuji Invests in Motus Ventures’ Fund Focused on Robotics and AI

FUJI Corporation (headquarters Chiryu, Japan), through its US subsidiary FUJI America Corporation, has joined Motus Ventures‘ Motus SWIF fund as a limited partner investor.

FUJI and Motus will work closely together to pursue investments in startups focusing on technologies directly relevant to autonomous mobile robots, as well as businesses focused on developing such robots, for a variety of applications.

FUJI has established an Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley, CA and is currently developing various automation solutions in fields such as logistics and heavy industry.

Prior to joining the SWIF fund, FUJI and Motus co-invested in RIOS, a Palo Alto based developer of advanced robotic systems – including fusion of vision and haptic sensing – used for automation of factory assembly lines. RIOS originated in 2018 from the Stanford Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities Program, where Motus is a member and commercialization advisor.

Led by Jim DiSanto, Managing Partner, Motus Ventures is a seed stage venture capital fund and business accelerator focusing on AI, Robotics and IoT across several of the world’s largest industries including transportation, telecommunications, commercial real estate, agriculture and industrial manufacturing. Motus also provides value-added services to help launch new businesses which originate from university researchers and scientists who have a new promising technology and desire to form a startup company, entrepreneurs in the field who need resources and money, and spin outs from established technology focused businesses.

During the past 8 years, Motus has made investment across transportation, industrial robotics, semiconductor, mobile communications, smart cities, agriculture technology, logistics, commercial workspace management, security and surveillance, and related fields. Previous investments include Quanergy systems, a developer of optical phased array LiDAR and Metawave (a spin-out from PARC). In both of these companies, Motus was a founding investor, incubator and early board member.

FinSMEs

02/03/2021